REPLIES TO CRITICISMS. 297 



successive deliverances forming the steps of the demonstration, by 

 severally evolving contradictions, show their untrustworthiness, or, 

 (2) if, being trustworthy, they lead to the result that, on certain ques- 

 tions, Reason cannot give any deliverance. 



Reason leads both inductively and deductively to the conclusion 

 that the sphere of Reason is limited. Inductively, this conclusion 

 expresses the result of countless futile attempts to transcend this 

 sphere — attempts to understand matter, motion, space, time, force, in 

 their ultimate natures — attempts which, bringing us always to alter- 

 native impossibilities of thought, warrant the inference that such 

 attempts will continue to fail, as they have hitherto failed. Deduc- 

 tively, this conclusion expresses the result of mental analysis, which 

 shows us that the product of thought is in all cases a relation, iden- 

 tified as such or such ; that the process of thought is the identifica- 

 tion and classing of relations ; that therefore Being in itself, out of 

 relation, is unthinkable by us, as not admitting of being brought within 

 the form of our thought. That is to say, deduction explains that fail- 

 ure of Reason established as an induction from many experiments. 

 And to call in question the ability of Reason to give this verdict 

 against itself, in respect of these transcendent problems, is to call in 

 question its ability to draw valid conclusions from premises ; which 

 is to assert a general incompetence necessarily inclusive of the special 

 incompetence. 



Closely connected with the foregoing is a criticism from Dr. Man- 

 sel, on which I may here make some comments. In a note to his 

 "Philosophy of the Conditioned " (page 39), he says : 



" Mr. Herbert Spencer, in his work on 'First Principles,' endeavors to 

 press Sir W. Hamilton into the service of Pantheism and Positivism together " 

 (a somewhat strange assertion, by-the-way, considering that I reject them 

 both), " by adopting the negative portion only of his philosophy — in which, in 

 common with many other writers, he declares the absolute to be inconceivable 

 by the mere intellect — and rejecting the positive portions, in which he most 

 emphatically maintains that the belief in a personal God is imperatively de- 

 manded by the facts of our moral and emotional consciousness. . . . Sir TV. 

 Hamilton's fundamental principle is, that consciousness must be accepted entire, 

 and that the moral and religious feelings, which are the primary source of our 

 belief in a personal God, are in no way invalidated by the merely negative 

 inferences which have deluded men into the assumption of an impersonal abso- 

 lute. . . . Mr. Spencer, on the other hand, takes these negative inferences as 

 the only basis of religion, and abandons Hamilton's great principle of the dis- 

 tinction between knowledge and belief." 



Putting these statements in the order most convenient for discussion, 

 I will deal first with the last of them. Instead of saying what he 

 does, Dr. Mansel should have said that I decline to follow Sir W. 

 Hamilton in confounding two distinct, and indeed radically opposed, 



